Duke of Bay

Well, B and I decided to celebrate our 10th anniversary a bit early. We figured we will probably be in Michigan on the actual day (Dec. 30 for those who don’t know) wishing we were somewhere else a lot warmer. So now we will still be in the same place at the same time thinking the same thing, only we will have already been in the warmer place, and we will just be really cold while we think about how we already celebrated in that warmer place. Should be a lot of fun. So we went to a beach resort, and left the kids with Grandaddy and Lola where they watched movies, ate good food, and made things like dolls and rubberband guns. We enjoyed 4 nights away, and 5 days. The nights were nice, and so were the days. Although we were at a beach resort, we only were in the water once. We went snorkeling, but while we were out we noticed about 8 people on the veranda of our room having what sounded like a very fun party. We cut our snorkeling time short to get back to our room to join the party (and to see what the occasion was) but it turned out we were gate crashers and only the entire housekeeping staff and trainees were invited. Oh well. It was windy much of the time and we spent most of it either in bed, or in the rocking chairs on the porch. Between us we read 7 books, and took 15 showers.

The resort was very nice by Filipino standards, and nice by western ones, although the food was limited to ‘ok’ Filipino food. Actually, they had good bacon, which is impressive here, but not that hard to produce. The rooms are kept up, and the landscaping is nice. Usually a resort will either be nice but not maintained, or stripped down so that it does not need to be maintained as much. It was wonderful to stay somewhere that was built nice, AND maintained. We had a second floor room that overlooked the ocean from a height of about 50 feet. The small section of the ocean that we overlooked contained a coral reef, and so the clear water was dappled with different shades of aqua-blue and green. They had built around the existing trees (which is also unusual here) and so the view was only partially obscured by leafy masses. It made for some good framing.